Speght also published a volume of poetry, Mortalities Memorandum with a Dreame Prefixed (London, 1621), a Christian reflection on death and a defence of the education of women.
"Rachel's education was unusual for a young woman of her time and social position in its thoroughness, and exceptional in that it was based on a classical curriculum.
James Speight, Rachel's father, was an ordained doctor of divinity from Christ's college in Cambridge.
He was the rector of two London churches, St. Mary Magdalen, Milk Street (1592–1637) and St. Clement, Eastcheap (1611–1637), and was also an author of religious tracts.
Rachel Speght was married at age 24, on 2 August 1621, to a Calvinist minister named William Procter at St Mary Woolchurch Haw in London.
Rachel Speght is considered the first Englishwoman to identify herself, by name, as a polemicist and critic of gender ideology.
Swetnam did not write a response to Speght, yet his popular Arraignment of Women ran through ten editions by 1634.
His tract is typical of the tradition of misogynist writing at the time; it is full of rowdy jokes, anecdotes and examples of women's lechery, vanity and worthlessness.
She uses satire and witty word play to denounce his character and his arguments, calling him "Irreligious and Illiterate" (Speght, title page).
Her approach, both logic-based and re-interpretive, influenced both the Protestant discourse of biblical exegesis, and the writings and activities of some Jacobean women who were posing challenges to gender hierarchy (for example, female cross-dressing), at the time.
Unlike the other writers that entered the debate, Speght was also willing to attach her identity to her writing that directly attacks a male author and his work.
At age 24, Speght published Mortalities Memorandum with a Dreame Prefixed (London, 1621), a volume of two poems that urge and offer a Christian meditation on death, and defend the education of women.
It claims that women and men are suited to education on the same basis – the equality of intellect – and that God requires the use of all talents from both sexes.
Mortalities Memorandum is a Christian meditation on death written in the conventional Protestant style of moral essay.
Drawing the themes of the devastating and damning cessation of her true vocation together with a meditation on death perhaps reflects that Speght viewed life as a "prison which denies women the liberating salvation of education for their minds and their souls" (Vecchi, 3).